Amazon CloudWatch vs HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM)

Likelihood to Recommend

Ideal for monitoring AWS services and workloads. We have several of our websites entirely hosted on AWS and we're able to get a Grafana dashboard of all the relevant metrics from CloudFront, S3, EC2, RDS, and Elastic Beanstalk. This can be set up within the hour or templated on your code for infrastructure (we do this with terraform & cloud formation). By design, it isn't suited for non-AWS workloads.

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Verified User

Professional in Finance and Accounting

Financial Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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This software is suited for a smaller organization with a small datacenter that uses mainly HP hardware. Once the environment gets larger it would pay to move to some of their paid for products

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Alex Gouskos

Senior System Engineer

Sandata TechnologiesHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees

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Pros

Managing log retention periods is very simple with CloudWatch, and can be configured on a per-group basis.
Monitoring host performance is very easy when coupled with the CloudWatch Agent on an EC2 instance. A simple installation and configuration replaces an entire 3rd-party host monitoring stack.
CloudWatch is flexible enough for not just host monitoring, but application monitoring as well. It's easy to pipe local logs up to CloudWatch and extract structured data in order to monitor and set alerts on custom app metrics.

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Brian Dentino

Founder

finbox.ioInternet, 1-10 employees

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HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at scanning for devices and adding them for monitoring is almost effortless.
HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at detecting most HP hardware and integrating with local management software.

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Alex Gouskos

Senior System Engineer

Sandata TechnologiesHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees

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Cons

CloudWatch doesn't monitor things outside of the cloud, it's not what it is intended for.
Billing is confusing as it bills on Dashboard, metrics called, custom metrics, etc. Hard to forecast the charge.
Paradigm is confusing sometimes and difficult to learn.

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Retail Company, 1001-5000 employees

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I think some of the areas that HP Systems Insight Manager can improve is non HP hardware.
This software also sometimes struggles handling larger environments.
This software also has issues managing environments that aren't set up perfectly.

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Alex Gouskos

Senior System Engineer

Sandata TechnologiesHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees

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Usability

Amazon CloudWatch 7.0

Based on 2 answers

The tool collects a great deal of data, and data that's not available many other places. But the data is hidden in obscure places, and the logs are hard to read and follow. The user interface could use a heavy rework, and several companies have made a business out of scraping the data and presenting it better.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

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HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) 7.0

Based on 1 answer

For basic functions it's very easy to set up and use. However, for more advanced functions it takes a lot of time to figure out its quirks

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Alex Gouskos

Senior System Engineer

Sandata TechnologiesHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees

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Support Rating

Amazon CloudWatch 7.6

Based on 16 answers

Support is effective, and we were able to get any problems that we couldn't get solved through community discussion forums solved for us by the AWS support team. For example, we were assisted in one instance where we were not sure about the best metrics to use in order to optimize an auto-scaling group on EC2. The support team was able to look at our metrics and give a useful recommendation on which metrics to use.

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Ramindu Deshapriya

Lead Consultant - Technology

VirtusaComputer Software, 10,001+ employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Implementation Rating

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) 7.0

Based on 1 answer

It's good for small organizations that use HP branded equipment

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Alex Gouskos

Senior System Engineer

Sandata TechnologiesHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

I can only speak to how it's positively benefited my organization. The problem was that hosting in-house servers is no longer a cost-effective solution vs. containerization in the cloud. But once you rely on hosting servers in the cloud you need a tool to manage every aspect of that including log monitoring, resource utilization, and application performance. Amazon CloudWatch is exactly the tool you need.

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Verified User

Employee in Engineering

Information Services Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Some of the other products I use for system management are HP SiteScope and SolarWinds Orion NPM and APM. SiteScope is another good HP product but it isn't very cost effective to use for general system management. It's good for performing complex alerting and monitoring. SolarWinds makes a great product but it is better geared for gathering statistics and performance data real-time and historically. Again the cost of this product makes it ineffective for general system monitoring.

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Alex Gouskos

Senior System Engineer

Sandata TechnologiesHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Scalability. Saving us cost when we can downgrade underperforming instances.
Great monitoring and peace of mine without always having to check logs to any services failure.
Support cost is high. It would be nicer if documentation would be easier to follow.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 51-200 employees

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Since this software is free if you buy HP hardware the cost is nothing which is nice for cash strapped businesses.
This software has a somewhat difficult time handling large environments where systems are not configured perfectly for this software.
I would always recommend having multiples of this software installed for redundancy because generally unless it and the environment is properly configured it can require maintenance.

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Alex Gouskos

Senior System Engineer

Sandata TechnologiesHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

Yes

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Amazon CloudWatch Editions & Modules

Edition

First 10,000 Metrics	$0.30¹
Next 240,000 Metrics	$0.10¹
Next 750,000 Metrics	$0.05¹
Over 1,000,000 Metrics	$0.02¹

Per Metric

Additional Pricing Details

With Amazon CloudWatch, there is no up-front commitment or minimum fee; you simply pay for what you use. You will be charged at the end of the month for your usage.

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

—

Amazon CloudWatch vs HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM)